The Handshaker (20 page)

Croft glanced up briefly to ensure they were taking it all in, then returned to his
ad hoc
lecture.

“In that same line, he uses the word ‘bint’. Another interesting word. It’s Arabic. It originally meant a young woman, usually without a daughter. It came into English slang in the late 20s and was in general use throughout the 40s and 50s, when the slang for a woman began to change: bird, chick, bit of tail, bit of skirt, and these days it’s totty. This indicates to me that he was probably a teenager anywhere from the end of the war to the end of the sixties.”

Croft shuffled his notes around. “In one of the other notes, yesterday, I found a reference to yoni. Along with its male counterpart,
lingam
, the word has come into modern usage, but it’s hardly commonplace. It would be immediately recognisable to anyone into tantric sex, but its genesis in the English language goes back to Sir Richard Burton’s translation of
The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana
, a book which only became generally available after the Chatterley trial in 1960. Most teenagers from that era would have read the book if only for its erotic content, in the same way that they read
Lady Chatterley
and John Cleland’s
Fanny Hill
, looking for the ‘naughty bits’.”

Croft pushed the note to one side and focussed on the two officers.

“My guess is, he’s somewhere between 50 and 60 right now. Given his apparently incredible stamina in taking and raping these women, I’d go with a slightly younger age, but you never can tell.” He shrugged. “Essentially, what you have here is either a middle-aged man or a well-educated, younger man who’s gone to a great deal of trouble to disguise himself as middle-aged, and either way, he’s trying to pretend that he’s a young, streetwise kid.”

Across the table, Shannon and Millie were astonished. Neither had anything to say, both stared blankly at him.

The spell was broken by a knock at the door. It opened and a uniformed officer brought tea in.

Shannon waited until the young constable had left again, stirred his tea, and asked, “You got all that from those few notes?”

“It stares you in the face when you know what to look for. Your own profilers should have picked it up, but again, if they’re younger men, or were educated in the state sector, they may not have spotted the clues. And remember, I read English at university when I flunked law.” Croft picked up a cup of tea and sipped with a grimace. “Christ, that’s awful.”

“Forget the tea,” Shannon ordered. “He makes reference to dice or trivia. Is he playing a game of chance with us?”

Croft frowned again, his brain working energetically at the problem. “I don’t think so. Again, it’s an anagram, but up to now, I haven’t been able to make sense of it.”

Millie grunted. “So it doesn’t give us any clue to where Trish Sinclair or Victoria Reid might be, or your girlfriend?”

“Well, as I say, I haven’t… Who? Who was the other one?”

“Victoria Reid,” repeated Millie. “She was abducted last night from a petrol station on Fenton Road and we think The Handshaker took her.”

Croft did not reply. He stared at the note, his mind working feverishly on the letters. He took out his pen, scribbled, ‘Victoria Reid’ on a sheet of paper and then began to run through the words, ‘dice or trivia’ scoring through each letter as he went along. Before he was halfway through, he was satisfied that the solution was correct.

“Yes. It’s there.” He looked them in the eye. “Dice or trivia is an anagram of Victoria Reid. He has her.”

There was no mistaking the cynicism in Shannon’s voice. “He’s a busy bloke, isn’t he? Not only has he got your girlfriend, but Victoria Reid too. Taking them in pairs now.”

“Shannon,” Croft insisted, “I’m not mistaken about this. I pail a ricin scart is an anagram of Patricia Sinclair, dice or trivia is an anagram of Victoria Reid. You say the note comes from The Handshaker, not me. He has them both.”

“And what next?” demanded the superintendent. “He told Sandra Lumb to commit suicide?”

Croft’s features paled. His heart pounded. Was it possible? He snatched up the verse and read it again, and as he did so everything made sense. The previous day’s note, today’s note, the deaths of Alf and Sandra Lumb. It all slotted together. He found himself a curious mixture of excitement, revulsion and fear.

“That is exactly what it’s all about.”

Shannon and Millie looked at each other.

“What?” Millie asked.

“The Heidelberg Case and The Handshaker’s murders,” said Croft. “He had Sandra Lumb kill her husband and then commit suicide.”

Croft was certain that Shannon almost laughed out loud. Instead, the superintendent smirked. “I was taking the mickey,” he said.

“Yes, I know you were,” Croft replied, “but what’s the old saying about many a true word spoken in jest?” Croft laid the verse on the table and half turned it so Shannon could read it too. Using his pen as a pointer, he explained his findings. “Mal’s drab un, is an anagram of Sandra Lumb. She went over the top. Literally. Further down, The Handshaker refers to rawl tarn fez, which is an anagram of Franz Walter, who is accepted as a master hypnotist, and he persuaded Mrs E to murder her husband. She tried but failed no less than six times, so Walter persuaded her to commit suicide, and again she tried, but failed. In this note, he tells us that rawl tarn fez, Franz Walter will lose his number one spot to shade then hark, The Handshaker. In other words, The Handshaker has succeeded where Walter failed. He has managed to get Sandra Lumb to murder her husband and then commit suicide.”

His theory was greeted with a long silence. Shannon looked doubtful, Millie looked as if she were waiting to decide which bridge she would burn.

Eventually, she said, “It sounds reasonable to me.”

“Well it doesn’t to me,” said Shannon. “With both of them dead, without a confession from The Handshaker, we’d never prove it.”

Croft leaned back in his seat, tossed his pen on the table, reflecting Millie’s actions earlier in the morning. “Trust me. I’m right. The biggest problem we face is finding him before he can murder Trish and the other woman.”

26

The sun burned onto Trish’s back as she patted sand into her bucket, turned it upside down and gently removed it, revealing a small, round turret of sand. She looked back at her parents. Mum was asleep and Dad was reading the
Daily Mirror
. He beamed a generous smile on her.

“Castles on the ground, lass? Better than castles in the air.”

Trish didn’t understand. She looked around the broad expanse of beach where thousands of people were enjoying the hot summer. Music from fairground rides filled the air, a Punch and Judy man entertained children near the sea wall, and down at the shoreline, her brothers were amongst hundreds of people splashing in the calm, shallow water. Trish had no mind for any of them. Instead, she stared out at the sea, which stretched for miles and miles.

***

Croft had once told Trish that her detailed memory of a childhood holiday in Bridlington, was a safety device; a haven to which she could retire when the stress of reality became too much for her.

Trish would agree. Her father, a builder by trade, had spent three months in prison for taking industrial action in the face of Edward Heath’s fledgling Industrial Relations Act, and while he was away, the five-year-old Trish had pined for him. That holiday, the first after his release, was a time of great security, but one of anxiety, too. She would never go to the sea to play like her brothers. She was too afraid that her father might go away again, and unlike her brothers, both older than her, she needed her father.

She had needed him all her life, to be there with calm reassurance when the pressure told on her, with his fatherly advice when the inevitable quandaries of life confronted her, as a shoulder to cry on when she needed it. She was still in the throes of devastation after his recent death, and right now she needed his strength, his very presence to help her deal with this nightmare.

Whatever hazy psychological reason lay behind her favourite childhood memory, she needed her father now, or more correctly, she needed her partner.

She had difficulty accepting what had happened. Her last memory was the drive to the railway station, fraught with the usual rush hour difficulties, but after that she could remember nothing until she came round hours – days – later in this small, cramped and dingy room and some man was fucking her.

Overcoming her initial shock and outrage, she made to throw him off and discovered that she could not move. She was pinned to a damp and uncomfortable mattress by his weight, and her wrists and ankles were bound to old fashioned, iron bed rails. He had jammed something into her mouth, making it difficult to swallow, and he had applied broad masking tape over her lips to prevent her spitting it out. All she could do was lay there while he took her.

He shuddered through a climax and for a short time lay there, regaining control over his breathing. Trish raged silently and impotently. The bastard had not used a condom and that meant he had no worries about leaving trivia like DNA samples behind. Why wasn’t he worried? Because he had no intention of allowing her to be found. Fear and fury made her heart beat strongly. If she could free just one foot she would teach this animal a lesson he would never forget.

And when he stood up, faced her, she recognised him instantly. The pain of betrayal was almost as great as his frightening abuse of her body. How could she have trusted him? How could he be so heartless as to take advantage of her vulnerability?

That was yesterday. Today she ached. Aside from a few minutes when her abductor had taken her to use the toilet, she had been bound in this position for over twenty-four hours. Every bone and muscle in her body was strained to the point where her whole nervous system seemed to be screaming agony at her.

“Anyone can control pain,” Croft had told her many times, “and hypnotically induced analgesia is one of the simplest effects to facilitate. It only requires concentration and the conviction that the body will not respond to pain.”

Now she wished she had listened more closely to him and learned the trick. She had tried concentrating, without success, and the only time she felt any relief was when she retreated to the beach at Bridlington, but even that memory was beginning to dim with the increasing discomfort of her rigid position.

With the curtains closed, there was little to mark the passage of time, but earlier, she had heard voices from below. She could not distinguish any words, but there was definitely more than one voice. She thought that by raising her buttocks from the bed and letting them fall again, she may be able to attract some attention, but when she tried, she learned that she was stretched so completely that even with her atrophied muscles fully flexed, she could raise her bottom no more than an inch from the mattress; insufficient to make any impression, woefully short of making any noise.

Soon after, the voices ceased and then he came to her again, stripping before her terrified eyes, massaging his member to a rampant erection and grinning down at her.

“You’re enjoying this, Sinclair. I know you are. You’ve never been fucked as expertly as this in your life.”

And he had taken her again. Unable to penetrate her bone-dry vagina, he had used Vaseline to grant him easy access and romped his way to a violent climax. Then, while Trish tried to reconcile the outrageous assault, he sat on the corner of the bed, toying with his flagging penis, and he talked to her.

“I’ve had a lot of women, but you are one of the best. And do you know why? Not because you’re in better shape than them. Some were younger than you, had tighter holes, bigger tits. Some were better hypnotised than you, and they responded with an enthusiasm that could have been real. No, Sinclair, it’s because you’re Croft’s woman. That’s what makes you better.” He ran a finger along her semen-stained vagina. “By now your boyfriend should be out there looking for you, and he’ll assume that you’re just another victim.”

He stood, turned to face her, moved up the bed and rubbed the glistening, flaccid bell against her nipple, his eyes half closing as he obviously revelled in the thrilling sensations.

“Is he in for a rude awakening? And while he’s puzzling it all out, I get to have his girl as many times as I want.”

27

With the time coming up to 11:30, even though the rain showed no signs of abating, Croft was glad to be out of the police station, but his relief was tinged with irritation and anxiety. He was annoyed that they would not take him seriously and shift the search for Trish into a higher gear, and anxiety for her safety.

Millie, on her way out on routine matters, accompanied him to the exit, and was sympathetic. “Most of what you said back there came out of left field, but made sense in a whacko sort of way, but what can I do? Ernie is in charge of this investigation and I have to follow orders.”

Croft was in no mood for olive branches. “You didn’t follow orders yesterday when you showed me those notes. Besides, aren’t inspectors allowed to chase up their own ideas?”